The White Album

Highlighting the theme of The Hazy Distinction Among Media, Reality, and Consumerism, Didion’s husband watches TV for news about the possible tidal wave in Hawaii. He consumes media to discover what might happen to his family’s reality, and the media tells him that no tidal wave is imminent, so the media shapes their reality.

Didion doesn’t read The New York Times—an imputed serious publication. Call-in shows shape her reality, so her view of the world is different. She thinks about violence and death, and her weary tone highlights her pessimism. Imagery furthers the glum mood. With vivid language, she paints an unflattering portrait of herself: “I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves” (119-20).

In Hawaii, the Didions try to create a new narrative and identity: “We spend, my husband and I and the baby, a restorative week in paradise. We are each the other’s model of consideration, tact, restraint at the very edge of the precipice” (120). The diction—the words—undercut the presentation. They’re performing and concealing the shaky ground they continue to inhabit. The private beach links to the motif of privilege and control. People behind the rope control their environment and don’t worry about strangers or crime. Didion thinks about violence and death, but her reality is free from such things. She’s included with the affluent group. She’s safe.

The hotel’s history reinforces its power and prestige: “[Newspapers] arrive at the Royal one and sometimes two days late, which lends the events of the day a peculiar and unsettling distance” (124). The motif of violence and pain connects to the motif of privilege. Privileged people don’t necessarily need to know what’s happening elsewhere. They can distance themselves from the world’s disruptive events, like the assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

When Didion returns to Hawaii, she goes beyond the hotel and confronts the world’s violence. She visits the cemetery and watches a funeral. She then travels to Schofield Barracks. This trip to the army base links to the theme of The Hazy Distinction Among Media, Reality, and Consumerism. Jones’s novel impacts how she sees the area. In addition, the barracks reveal Didion’s infatuation with systems. She grows attached to the robotic organization of army life: “In many ways, I found it difficult to leave Schofield that day. I had fallen into the narcoleptic movements of the Army day” (134).

Didion uses Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby to introduce the world of Hollywood. Fiction guides her reality or her portrayal of a superficial, affluent society. She develops her portrait of Hollywood with imagery, using vivid language to illustrate a typical Hollywood gathering. She describes the house, the food, the movie the guests watch, the women’s airy talk, and the men’s financial concerns. As with the women’s movement, Didion scorns the vain women at the party: “[They] seem to have ascended through chronic shock into an elusive dottiness” (136).

The movie business is about money, and Didion pivots to the diction of economics. She uses words like break-even, gross, and property. A screenplay or a story is the “property” or “basic material,” and people don’t need a “truly beautiful story” but “capital” (141). People in Hollywood care about money and deals, not storytelling. More important than creative stories are “creative deals” (142). Didion’s Hollywood again connects to the theme of The Hazy Distinction Among Media, Reality, and Consumerism. Moviegoers consume a story like Bullitt, but, in reality, the narrative is secondary. The movie industry’s primary concern is betting. They’re gambling that “several million people would pay three dollars apiece to watch Steve McQueen drive fast” (146).

Within a part of the book called “Sojourns,” the essay title “In Bed” is ironic. It’s not a city, state, or country; people don’t typically talk about traveling or taking a sojourn to bed. Nonetheless, when Didion gets migraines, she travels to her bed and stays put. The migraines link to the theme of Storytelling. Didion can’t cobble together a coherent narrative to account for their presence. The migraines connect to the motif of pain as well: “[W]hen the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties” (154). It’s as if pain represents reality or truth. The painful migraines pull Didion away from petty, superficial thoughts, keeping her grounded.

The title “On the Road,” is ironic in another way. It alludes to Jack Kerouac’s Beatnik novel On the Road (1957)—but unlike Kerouac’s protagonist, Didion isn’t traveling the country in search of soulful, spiritual experiences. Didion is on a book tour. She’s promoting a product, her unnamed book, and she sees constant media. She’s on TV and radio, and when she’s traveling, she’s surrounded by diverse media sources, like “the closed-circuit screens in airports that flashed random stories off the wire” (157). Death, too, becomes a product of the media: The photographer must catch a jumper in the act if he wants to get his photo in the New York newspaper.

The motif of privilege and control returns here too. Didion and her daughter fly first class and stay in hotels with room service. The amenities give Didion power: “I began to see America as my own, a child’s map over which my child and I could skim and light at will” (157). Didion uses irony and repetition to mock these luxuries. She repeats “we needed” (158) to describe their flurry of room service orders. Didion and her daughter don’t really need “infusions of consommé, oatmeal, crab salad, and asparagus vinaigrette” (158), but they can have them.

Consumerism continues in “On the Mall,” as Didion connects buying a home, buying a car, and buying things from the mall. What interests her the most is the mall’s system. She uses the diction of shopping malls with phrases like “striping the lot” and “anchoring the mall” (164). The malls relate to the theme of Storytelling too: “I wanted to build them because I had fallen into the habit of writing fiction” (163). The malls seem to symbolize a reprieve from reality. They’re a place one can go to get away from their feelings, and Didion, adopting the tone of an advice columnist, names some good malls to visit if one is “feeling low” (166).

In her Bogotá essay, Didion presents the image of a shopping mall next to a church, and consumerism impacts the funeral at the church. Didion notices women in “black pant-suits and violet-tinted glasses and pleated silk dresses and Givenchy coats” (174). The imagery recurs throughout the essay. Didion writes, “Of the time I spent in Bogotá I remember mainly images, indelible but difficult to connect” (173). The fragmented essay highlights Bogotá’s violence and, because Didion doesn’t personally experience any violence, reveals her privilege.

“Hoover Dam” connects to the motif of death: 96 men died during its construction. The phrase about the deaths, “[t]hey died to make the desert bloom,” (176) and the bronze sculptures tell a story about the dam, but Didion contests the story’s reality. About the sculptures, Didion claims that they “evoke muscular citizens of a tomorrow that never came” (176). What Didion likes about the dam is its independence: “There was something beyond all that, something beyond energy, beyond history, something I could not fix in my mind” (180). The dam’s mysterious, elusive power appeals to her.